We all love to know the difference our giving makes. If you have given to SLCC recently, here are some of the ways your gifts have made a difference:
- So far this year five people have been baptized and four others have joined our church!
- A team of six from SLCC traveled to Chile to support our missionaries in Santiago. We taught church leaders, worked in a Vacation Bible School with 125 children and made repairs to a church building.
- Through our Blessing Buckets we provided a bus pass for a member, bought a gas card so a gentlemen could visit his sick mother, helped the friend of a member with her mother’s funeral expenses, and much more.
- We paid the registration fees for our Modified volunteers so they attend last week’s Statewide Youth Rally where they deepened their investment in our high school student’s discipleship.
- We engaged with Capital Area Community Services to pack food boxes for the Holt Community Food Bank. So many of our members and friends participated that CACS set up another “assembly line” for the day! Our church provided pizza for all the volunteers, including those not from SLCC.
Knowing that your giving makes a difference makes it easy to get excited about our upcoming 30 Pieces of Silver Offering. You might recall this special Easter offering that we have taken up in years past. We needed previous 30 Pieces offerings to help our general fund keep afloat. This year, however, we have a chance to do more than just catch up; we have a chance to move ahead in three specific ways:
- The first 10 percent, a tithe of our 30-pieces offering, will go directly to our Blessing Buckets. Our deacons have been working to help a homeless individual find housing. We have developed a sustainable plan that requires a security deposit and first month’s rent. This offering will infuse our Blessing Buckets with enough money so we can make this Easter an amazing one for a (formerly) homeless person. (Cost: $1000-1400)
- We also want to update the Kid’s City check-in computers. Recently we broke a Sunday morning record with 86 kids and Kid Builders in Kid’s City. If you’ve checked kids in, you know that some Sundays are hectic. Our check-in computers are 15 years old, and often crash. New computers will provide greater reliability. They will also enable our regular attenders to self-register their children, so our Kid’s City staff can focus on assisting first-time guests in registering their kids. (Cost: $2500)
- Finally, we would like to replace the video projector in the worship center. Since buying our current projector seven years ago, South has become considerably more visually oriented in our worship services. We show videos regularly, and we use images for singing and sermons every week. Like all things electronic, video projectors have come a long way in seven years. The latest LCD technology allows brighter, bolder, crisper images and would be a big improvement to the worship gathering. (Cost: $12,000-15,000)
That’s how we plan to spend it, but how do we plan to collect it? The night before he was crucified, Jesus was betrayed for 30 pieces of silver. This offering is our way of saying that we choose a different path. Rather than betray Jesus for 30 pieces of silver, we choose to honor Jesus with 30 pieces of silver. We’re asking that, in addition to your normal tithe, you bring “30 more” with you on Easter Sunday. We're asking our children to bring 30 nickels or 30 dimes. Older children who earn money for help around the house that might be able to donate 30 quarters. You might want to raid your change jar and bring silver, but maybe you can do even more. $30 extra from every adult on Easter Sunday will make a difference. An even bigger impact would be for you to bring thirty ten or twenty dollar bills. Or imagine dropping a check in the offering for 30 hundred-dollar bills - $3000! If a handful of generous Jesus followers do that, this offering will accomplish each of our three goals and more!
It is exciting to be able to collect this “above-and-beyond-offering,” because it is about more than just treading financial water. The reason we’re able to do something special with this offering is because of your generous weekly offerings that have enabled us to pay our staff, partner with our missionaries, and do ministry here in Lansing and beyond. We’re able to do more than just “catch up” because our staff and finance teams make sure we are careful in our spending and that we don’t outpace our giving. Because of their responsible stewardship – and yours, too – we can direct this special offering to three initiatives that will help us take some positive steps forward.
Thanks for taking a moment to think about how you can contribute to this special offering, and thanks for praying about the gift that God wants you to bring on Easter Sunday. As always, we invite you to contact us with any questions you might have. Call me at 517-394-3220 or email me at frank@seekstudyserve.org. You can reach our elders at elders@seekstudyserve.org, or our finance team at finance@seekstudyserve.org.
You can even give online by clicking here. Thanks for your generosity!